Thinking too about this point from John Warner: "If writing is thinking (as I believe it to be) the last thing you want to outsource to AI is the first draft because that's where the initial gathering of thoughts happens. It's why first drafts are hard. That difficulty signals their importance."
Poem: "The day a poet is murdered by ICE" by hannah eve levy
FYI for Baltimore musicians!
A thoughtful and grounding interview with Ed Yong. He talks about hope, hummingbirds, masking, moral injury, journalism, burnout, birding, empathy, escapism, being present, and points in between.
A thread on queer history focusing on the Renaissance. I didn't know about a lot of these!
By definition, numerical weather models require international data. The atmosphere knows no geopolitical boundaries: any model that begins and ends at its country’s border is unable to generate reliable predictions until after a weather system crosses its boundaries. Which defeats the purpose!
Our library recently reduced the number of Hoopla checkouts per person per month to 5. They explained that Hoopla charges the library for each checkout; a single audiobook can be $3.99. This model became prohibitively expensive as more people used the services.
One of the best things you can do right now is read books. Buy them. Borrow them from the library. Gift them.
Read history. Read fiction. Read science writing. Read anything that shows you the world is bigger than what fascists say it is.
Read to remember why your resistance matters. 📚💙
Thinking about the science fiction novel We Are Satellites by Sarah Pinsker (which features brain implants that increase focus and a family in which two get it and two don't). Spoiler alert: not everything goes smoothly.
"Rain, New Year's Eve" by Maggie Smith The rain is a broken piano, playing the same note over and over. My five-year-old said that. Already she knows loving the world means loving the wobbles you can't shim, the creaks you can't oil silent—the jerry-rigged parts, MacGyvered with twine and chewing gum. Let me love the cold rain's plinking. Let me love the world the way I love my young son, not only when he cups my face in his sticky hands, but when, roughhousing, he accidentally splits my lip. Let me love the world like a mother. Let me be tender when it lets me down. Let me listen to the rain's one note and hear a beginner's song.
And here's "Rain, New Year's Eve" by Maggie Smith, another New Year's poem that's been on my mind:
"Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me" by Jane Hirshfield The world asks, as it asks daily: And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured? I count, this first day of another year, what remains. I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands. Can admire with two eyes the mountain, actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles. Can make black-eyed peas and collards. Can make, from last year’s late-ripening persimmons, a pudding. Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light. For four years, I woke each day first to the mountain, then to the question. The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old, and still they surprised. I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea, brought postcards and stamps. For four years, each day, something. Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace. Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder. Today, I woke without answer. The day answers, unpockets a thought from a friend don’t despair of this falling world, not yet didn’t it give you the asking
Here's all of "Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me," the Jane Hirshfield poem that I excerpted:
"Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace. / Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder. / Today, I woke without answer." -Jane Hirshfield, from "Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me." poets.org/poem/countin...
I found this to be a thought-provoking article about the impacts of AI readers (both positive and negative!) on education.
This, exactly. Writing is not the only way to think with and through ideas, but it is a visible and important one (and one that is important to me, of course).
If you think about it, the very best books are really just extremely long spells that turn you into a different person for the rest of your life
once a snowflake fell on my brow and i loved it so much and i kissed it and it was happy and called its cousins and brothers and a web of snow engulfed me then i reached to love them all and i squeezed them and they became a spring rain and i stood perfectly still and was a flower
"Winter Poem" by Nikki Giovanni:
7/8 4) Go see live music, especially independent musicians! (That could be a whole other post.)
6/8 3) Support musicians' Patreons, paying a small amount each month so they have a guaranteed cash flow.
5/8 2) Crowdfund albums. This involves paying musicians before the album is released; different levels have different perks (early digital release, physical merch, special items, etc.). Music is a low-risk crowdfunding endeavor; unlike other genres, I've never had an album not come to fruition.
4/8 1) Buy the music you like on Bandcamp. Pay $15 for that album. Then, keep on listening to it on a streaming service guilt-free if that's what works for you.
3/8 If you also believe that musicians deserve to be paid, here are some ways to financially support artists more directly:
2/8 Musicians get paid as little as $0.003 per stream and get nothing if a song is streamed fewer than 1000 times in a year. This means that 5000 streams could be $15 (the equivalent of selling one CD).
1/8 It's Spotify Unwrapped season, which means that it's time for a reminder that streaming is an absolutely trash business model, Spotify is particularly bad, and you can support independent music by finding other ways to pay for the music that you love.
Rereading this article about the philosophical & practical differences between Bandcamp and Spotify: "Spotify is not a 'music company first,' as Diamond describes Bandcamp, because music plays a role only insofar as people spend some of their time listening to it, and Spotify wants all their time."
A photo of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. Two long bookshelves stretch away from the camera on a tiled floor.
A photo of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore showing an ornate/silver accented ceiling.
A photo of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore showing the stone facade
A photo of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore showing a half-moon window with an ornate metal lattice covering
A moment to appreciate Baltimore’s Pratt Library 📚
I'm not on twitter anymore, but this tweet from 2 years ago is sadly more accurate than ever
I think we're probably underestimating the degree of change that will need to happen in education to deal with the presence of GenAI/LLMs. The studies I've read that show positive efficacy for LLM integration tend to measure that efficacy against what I call "schooling," rather than learning.
As someone whose most advanced degree is in Teaching Writing, my professional response to this headline is mostly just silent screaming.
A painting of the Colosseum in ruins by Giovanni Paolo Panini (Italian, ca. 1692-1765).
When botanist Richard Deakin examined Rome’s Colosseum in the 1850s, he found 420 species of plant growing in the ruins: cypresses and ilex, pea plants and more than 50 types of grasses.
But some flowers growing there mystified him. They were so rare they were found nowhere else in Europe.
From "A New National Anthem" by Ada Limón: "Perhaps / the truth is that every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal / snaking underneath us as we absent-mindedly sing / the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands / hoping our team wins." poets.org/poem/new-nat...
